Check out this article on FT.com…

Its an interesting line in with your blogpost re news content too…

Traffic for China’s social networking sites come thru via either games or NEWS CONTENT (ie. side product). Western users focus solely on social networking.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/cc852718-9724-11de-83c5-00144feabdc0.html

For those who say, “Who cares about China?”.

I think 340 million online users (and rapidly growing..!!) is reason enough to care.

Wish I could read Chinese..!

this will just drive them elsewhere.

http://money.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=857293

The music industry started the war in ol’ days (in Net terms) of Napster and have adapted to a certain extent. Its still pretty schizophrenic though.

On one hand, you have new talent being unearthed on Myspace and Youtube. Whilst on the other, you have major record labels suing regular folk for downloading music illegally.

I think the news content industry will follow a similar path. Some will adopt “FORTRESS AMERICA” style defence whilst others will be more liberal and innovative.

I also like the idea of CPM basis. You could have a baseline of remuneration (fixed) and also a performance fee on top.

@ daniel yes, very legitimate concerns re journalistic integrity. How do we value journalism and news readership? If its performance based does it cheapen the service?

With wholesalers of content, I would consider that aggregation sites are presumably this – like Huffington Post, All top, Feed.ly, Google News. Someone will develop a pay model around this – delivering customised content to you on demand.

I think that the news industry (and the music industry) will be very interesting in the next few years, as they battle / harness the power of free and develop new business models to support their content.

What’s stopping someone from subscribing for the service with say, news.com.au and then distributing it to the masses for free or a fee?

They will effectively act as “wholesalers” of news content.

I like the idea of performance based journalism. Interesting concept!

But, I think that some journos will argue that it may degrade the quality and integrity of the news articles out there.

ie. Why post an investigative in-depth article into the intricacies of the war in Iraq when a funny article about some Youtube movie will get more clicks and eyeballs?

The solution is probably to have defined audience target (for remuneration) for each “type” of journalist.

For example, entertainment (gossip) journos may have to hit higher audience targets than say, a specialised tax news journalist.

I’m not a journo so there will be others that will flame on about journalistic integrity, blah blah blah…

I’m looking at it from the finance point of view of measuring the performance-based remuneration. (^_^)

Not sure you’re comparing apples between the news industry and a tech start-up such as Yammer or Huddle. The greatest problem for the news industry is that they are people driven. News cannot be produced without journalists. People create news, and the people cost is now exceeding their advertising revenue. A tech start-up typically has minimal overheads, typically relying upon a small team of developers to maintain the technology.

Perhaps the answer is to link journalist remuneration to performance. Pay journalists based on eyeballs generated by their work. Then there would a clear incentive to produce high quality content & develop a clear understanding of reader needs. With so many free content producers, journalists need to deliver extraordinarily high quality content to justify payment.

I’ll close with this quote from Seth which I love, and is highly relevant to the news industry:

“Free is creating lots of attention, but marketers haven’t gotten smart enough to do something profitable with that attention.”

Give it two years and there will be a model in place around quality news content online possibly a subscription model tied in with a cross Chanel access – I see mobile a key player with data portability and easy billing access. Great post!